


Two Chaoses

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Tag, Multi, be warned, for everything Saxon, in fact he is unambiguously awful and abusive, it's the story of the Master and Lucy this is not going to be about the Master being nice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 08:27:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14516367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: How the Master used Lucy, and how the Master made the Doctor cry.





	Two Chaoses

...oft did we grow,  
To be two chaoses, when we did show  
Care to aught else ; and often absences  
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses. 

\--John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day"

 

Lucy is a beautiful, empty vessel.

Harry Saxon should know. It's taken him thirty months (seven hundred, thirty days; seventeen thousand, five hundred twenty hours; sixty-three million, seventy-two thousand seconds: Earth time is _fun_!) to prepare her, to make her this way. It began with the small things, cruelties any human could inflict, a biting word here, an averted gaze there. Sudden coldness in eyes that are normally loving. A sneer, appearing part-way through a conversation.

He scrapes his gaze over her body when she talks to him. He laughs with the other politicians when he's sure she's watching, telling them stories about what she's like in bed. At parties to which he's invited her, he speaks to everybody, anybody, but her, and especially to other women. These humans, with their limited, present-bound senses and their petty, carnal concerns, disgust him, but he endures, as he always has. He picks a girl, focuses on her, enough to make Lucy suspicious, not enough that she doesn't doubt herself, doesn't hate her own jealousy.

When she tries to gain his attention, he pretends he doesn't notice, pretends she's speaking too softly or that the people he's talking with are more important, until she is reduced to tugging on his sleeves, like an hysterical child. When he finally turns to her, turns on her, his expression is impatient, with anger sufficient to make her stumble back involuntarily, except that he digs his fingers into the small of her back, grips her upper arm, knuckles white. And then he smiles.

It doesn't take much.

In bed, he vacillates wildly between enthusiasm and disdain, kicks her out afterwards 'because he can't sleep' with her there. He makes sure, however, that he is the main preoccupation of her day, isolates her from family and friends, brings her pretty presents and tells her the things she wants to hear, flatters her fantastically. Strokes her cheek with the back of his hand.

By the time he shows her the TARDIS, he can make her cry in ten minutes, though she's a marvel with the face powder and the eyeliner, hiding any traces in instants with an expert hand. His companion. It seems fitting, that she's so helpless, that he has such power over her, and that she would try, so, so hard, to be good for him. That he has such a resourceful girl on his arm. Just like the Doctor. The TARDIS showed him. Everything the Doctor has done since the Time War. Every tear he has shed.

In the Doctor's absence, the old girl's about as helpless, about as easy to manipulate, as little Lucy.

She laughs when he guides her to the door, unlocks it, leads her inside. She thinks he wants to ravish her inside a defunct police box, and he thrills to her willingness, when he knows full well how frightened she is of dark, enclosed spaces. She clings to his body, letting her weight fall on his support, until it registers in her limited, human mind that this isn't a police box at all. Her blue eyes widen in wonder.

But she isn't noisy, doesn't pester him with obvious questions, knows better than to make him explain a science she could never understand. Instead, she runs a slender hand over the curved wall, leans against it lightly, and pulls him to her, meeting him with an open-mouthed, reverent kiss. She wraps an ankle around the back of his knee, rubs herself against his thigh, pushing her skirt around her hips. Coming up for air, she asks, as if it is only natural, "What will you do with it, darling?"

She's amazing, his Lucy, his human. He takes her by the hand and shows her around, to the garden room, the art gallery, the living quarters. He steers her to the Doctor's chambers, where he lets her draw him to the bed and finish kissing him. They lie on top of the soft comforter like youths stealing a moment of privacy, caressing to the rhythm of the TARDIS engines at rest. When he has had enough of that, he turns her over and fucks her to a different rhythm entirely.

He takes her to the end of the universe. It wouldn't be his first choice for an impressive date location, and he doesn't particularly want to go back there, but as it turns out, it's perfect. He pushes the TARDIS further than she wants to go, past Malcassairo, through the encroaching implosion, to Utopia. It's a bumpy ride, but it isn't as though Lucy knows any better.

The TARDIS materialises reluctantly. She must wonder, as he does, what would happen if they remained here beyond the death of Time.

Outside, darkness pervades like a plague, darkness in the rearing shadows; darkness from choking, black smoke; darkness above, on a sky like lead. Every star in the universe has gone out, burning and burning until each consumed itself entirely. Space presses upon the planet with all the weight of a million mountains, of a prison. The first impression he gets, when the darkness fades, is of compression. The star-less sky threatens to smother him, snuff him out as though he were a child, drowning again.

If the end of the universe leaves him awestruck, it is that much harder on his human companion. She clings to him, shivering. Her pupils are dilated, and her skin is abruptly, noticeably clammy. It occurs to him that this place is very much like the inside of a cupboard, and that she is doubly terrified. She's beautiful.

When he finds his bearings, they walk along an uneven path towards the only source of light in this narrow world. It's all too familiar, the fat obelisk, shaped like a grain silo, panelled in a thousand metal squares, thrusting out of the horizon. An obstinate creature, Yana's misguided rocket ship. It seems to glow demonically, and as they near it, he realises that it is indeed glowing: as many fires burn within it as there are ports for the smoke to escape, and more surround the base of the structure, in furnaces like gaping, down-turned mouths. The fuel consumption here must be through the roof, though even away from the ship, it is already much too hot to need it.

Still, Lucy shivers, and he curls his arm around her shoulder.

There is a great gaping gash in the side of the ship, the sort of mortal wound only a botched landing, a _crash_ landing could have caused, and he frowns, reaches to rest a hand consolingly on the metal skin before noticing the tang of radiation, of dirty particles clinging to the jagged tear, and withdraws in distaste. He tightens his hold on Lucy's back to keep her from brushing against the diseased rocket.

"Be careful, my love." He'll have to find her a decontamination room when they return to the TARDIS, spray her down with foam and fill her up with anti-radiation medications. (Could be fun, come to think of it. Human frailty has to be good for _something_.)

Inside, the smoke and fires are blinding, and it is all he can do not to turn around and leave these creatures to their doom. Only the thought of being stuck on Earth forever stops him, and his determination to prove the Doctor not so clever after all, for fusing the TARDIS co-ordinates. He shuts his mind to all of it, to the sting in his eyes, the stench of melting flesh and burning rubber, the constant hum of human misery. He allows the drums to crescendo, to drown out what his corporeal body must bear.

Five hundred metres into the body of the ship, they come upon the first inhabitant. He isn't sure whether it would be cruelty or kindness to call it human, though it certainly is of Earth. Provenance doesn't count for much, however, when you've perverted your very identity, torn your ancestors apart and stitched them back together again and called it rebirth.

The thing stands waist-high and has too many arms, too few legs. Its skin is black and shingled. It scuttles or limps, and it leaves a trail--mucus, mud, blood--that glistens by firelight. When it pushes the hood back from its head with clawed hands, he can see that its hair is completely intact, shining and yellow and just a touch curly. It appears to be sightless. The eyes, presumably, went to some other body, one of this one's brothers or sisters. But, though he freezes, pressing Lucy still, it senses them. It knows someone's there.

He wants to retch. It spreads out all of its arms in a sick parody of welcome and shuffles towards them, grinning wildly.

"Hug?"

Oh Rassilon, it speaks with the voice of a child, and even a Time Lord can't be expected to stomach that. It will not do. He takes his laser screwdriver out of his pocket and cuts off its head.

There is a bit of gore on Lucy's favourite linen dress after that, so he finds his handkerchief--not putting away the screwdriver for one minute--and dabs it clean for her. She's shuddering so hard he can't feel the tremor in his own hands, can't think of himself. By the time he tosses the square of cloth away, looks up again, more of the human patchwork dolls have gathered. The ones with eyes stare at the two of them. The smallest darts into the corner to retrieve the bloodied handkerchief, and to carry it away as though it were a precious relic.

He and Lucy are borne on a wave of mob motion, surrounded by these filth, deeper and deeper into hell. They pass a thousand staring faces in a thousand variations on the theme of rictus, and once or twice, he experiences a flash of recognition. Up in the bowels of the erstwhile spacecraft, they see the workbenches set up in mimicking mockery of Yana's lab, the massive furnaces, once interstellar engines, and the children of Earth, the last living beings in all of the universe, not just dying but rushing headlong before a wave-crest of fear that cannot help but grow and swell, fuelled by every nightmare in the species' collective memory.

In a closed system, there is nowhere to turn for new material. Shuffling the cards only gives the illusion of holding back entropy.

The fires are thirty metres tall and all around them, casting a diseased light through the warp of heat-distorted air. He is astounded at the idiocy of these humans as he watches the inferno devour oxygen like large, young stars consuming hydrogen, helium, anything that will fuse into heavier metals. Anything that will feed the burning. Circling the wagons to keep out a darkness that will seep in beneath their feet and through the wheel-spokes.

It's mercy that drives him, then, when he speaks to the children in a lilting, gentle voice, when he outlines his plan, constructs a fairy tale about salvation and hope and a playground trillions of years away, where the sun shines bright and new, and parents await every rescued tot. Where repulsive chimeras can become pretty angels in glittering, jewelled shells. Where they can have a very fun time indeed. Where they have time at all.

And as he laughs, caught up in the telling, the people of Utopia begin to sing, chanting in that five-note taunt known to every juvenile sentient, in every rapid and eddy of time and space. "Nyah nyah-nyah nyah nyah. Nyah nyah-nyah nyah nyah!" They join disfigured hands and dance madly, a circle twirling and tightening like a dervishistic ouroboros.

He laughs and laughs and laughs.

Then he takes Lucy by the hand, drops to a knee, and, flame licking at his toes, asks her to marry him.

He returns to Utopia alone on subsequent occasions; the heat death of the universe has done its work on her, and already there is a hint of psychosis in her eyes when she looks at him, as though she can see him burning. By day, he insists they act as though nothing has changed, guiding her by the elbow through an endless procession of parties and luncheons and political events. At night, before he departs, he tucks her in under goose-down and cotton, whispering of every wicked deed he has ever performed, every murder and invention and victory. He comes home at dawn, whistling a Wagner leitmotif, that one about the immolation.

"Honey, I'm home!" he screeches, bursting into their bedroom. In the beginning, he catches her still asleep, and this wakes her with a terrible start, blinking and stupefied, her hair mussed. As time passes, she learns to rouse herself when she hears the TARDIS groaning out of the Vortex or wakes to an alarm long before he appears. This behaviour suits him, and at first he randomises his timing, having at least that fine-level control on his travels between two measly points. But when the bags begin to show beneath her eyes, he gives it up. There are, at any rate, other ways to assert his mastery, and she deserves to experience the full range.

Some mornings, he slips into bed with her, still reeking of charnel and covered in soot. He kisses her and kisses her, sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal, often leading to the deviant more (she’s so alien, so young), hands that push her night-gown away, hands yet caked in the detritus of the night's work, recycling flesh, building cages. Later still, gleaming with an energy she cannot apprehend.

Even then, he hesitates. He likes her the way she is, hard edges and soft curves all at once, concealing a callous egocentricity behind her measured words, her prim clothes. The way she is, she could plot his downfall, could dream up the most lovely schemes, as she did when she began to court him, thinking him an up-and-coming politician she could use to save her family. Stripped of free will, all she'll be able _is_ to dream, like Coleridge in an opium reverie. He doesn't want that for her.

But then he wakes up sobbing the first time he tries to sleep, once the Toclafane are ready and the TARDIS is waiting, sky lightening in the east, and when Lucy holds him, chest to chest, he can feel his hearts racing and hers strangely singular, and he knows he cannot keep her as she is. (This body sleeps; it runs itself down and sleeps, another aberration.)

In his dream, he is dead again. That is enough. He won't let it happen, not so long as he can help it, and Lucy is insurance. He needs her.

That night, he goes into her mind. It's so very human in there, so linear where thought is conscious, so many colours everywhere else. Tasting of kumquats, that paradoxical fruit. At the surface, there are the conscious memories, threaded through with veins of thought, branched and twisting like rivers, or like the Vortex. He navigates those waterways as easily as he does time, sailing every surprised exclamation and word of uncertainty, allowing Lucy to adjust to his presence. To his astonishment, she begins to show him images, hesitantly at first, almost shy; indistinct impressions, all of him. The first time she saw him, at a distance; the afternoon they met, how she could sense he wasn't all he seemed but had thought it was the man's standard lies and deceptions; how she had wanted to keep him in her mouth forever, the night they had finally fumbled together in a linen cupboard, all drums and silk and too-hot skin.

But he has things to show her too, things about himself, memories he has never been able to bury. Running from a war his execution was meant to stay, the scent of his own oxidation still stinking in his mind; wandering the universe, alone, scrounging for bodies that were never his, no matter what he did to them, because anything was better than the alternative; staring into chaos, and learning to fear it, just a child. And to hate it. But then he woke from a long dream, and the very people who had betrayed him, his people, were gone, and only one was left, burning brighter than ever, laughing at him, mocking the naïveté of his human form, and he has been sowing chaos ever since, in a secret frenzy.

When he pulls away from her thoughts, he leaves a bit of himself behind, a reminder. _You belong to the Master,_ it says. _You will obey._

As though she ever wouldn't.

For six nights after that, he has nightmares, and for six nights he builds his presence in her mind, threading his message along the main pathways, sharing experiences no human ever could. They're gifts as much as they are tools, insights into what she is too deficient to know for herself. He gives her the stars, though he cannot take her travelling, and he shares the joy of flying, free, among them. Of watching them live, roaring in vacuum like the furnaces of Utopia, and then watching them die, supernovae and white dwarfs and pulsars, helpless, meaninglessly spinning beacons, heralding nothing. He gives her memories of power, over living creatures, over populations, species, worlds. He reminds her that she, too, has the power to give life and the power to kill, like him. He gives her time, not as a human understands it, but as a Time Lord does, whole, raw, capricious.

On the seventh night, by accident, he shows her what it is to die. He doesn't mean to, but when she pulls him to her, fitting herself around his back, the flash of recognition is so strong he can smell it: this is how he comforts her, after he has pushed her over the edge, thinking all the while how human she is, how pitiable.

He's distracted when he slips into her thoughts through the gates he's put in place, still stupid from dreaming. When he casts about for a memory, it blossoms into the mental connection like ink spilt into water. Death. Anguish. The first time he died, far too young. The second time, just out of the Academy. The third, the fourth, the fifth. How each time it was both easier and more difficult. How he'd dread it, though it became familiar, and what it was to keep count, knowing that one day, he would have to stay behind in the dark. How he tried to put it off, and succeeded for a time, and was always afraid. In the end, his death, the last one, the one that mattered, was wasted on a useless gesture to an enemy the Time Lords should have wiped out with a swipe of the hand, rigid, unimaginative fools. Executed by primitive machines. Sentenced by an upstart girl who thought herself so very clever.

He would have liked to watch _her_ die.

He fought. He fought with every fibre of will left in his crumbled remains to live, to _be_. And when he saw the Doctor, how young he had become, how beautiful, and more than ever, how alive, he knew where his salvation lay. One Time Lord body, with five precious regenerations left. He would tear away his bandages when he heard the shepherd's pipe, and together they would transfigurate, like Tristan, like Isolde, weeping for joy.

Only, it didn't happen like that. He thought, when he fell into the Eye of Harmony, that the Doctor had won, forever. Imagine his surprise when the President brought him back for a second round of 'sacrificial ram'. He was not interested, thank you very much.

He couldn't do it, not again.

He wonders now whether it would have been better for him if he had stayed, if perhaps dispersion was not so much like death at all. They are all free now, the Time Lords, their histories erased from the Rassilon era, from every era, their existence no longer felt in the universe, leaving only a smudge where the rubber passed by. He, on the other hand, remains, and remembers. 

He wonders what it would have been like to stand by the Doctor's side, triumphant over the wreckage of their enemy, cheered and welcomed by their families and in the Chapterhouses. To taste victory like artron on their lips as they rained destruction down onto the Daleks. Or to lie with him upon the battlefield, side by side, blood commingling between the sharp red blades of a Gallifreyan meadow. 

But it is Lucy who lies beside him in the bed, Lucy who will save him now. 

She's with him, of course, when he makes the dual announcement: a wedding and an election, all at once, and excuse me Mister Saxon, could you give us a statement on the state of British homeland security since you stepped in as Minister of Defense? Congratulations, Mister Saxon, and how do you find the time to campaign and be such a good husband? Tell our viewers, Mister Saxon, what is the secret of winning the hearts and minds of such a diverse public?

_Dundun dundun. Dundun dundun. Dundun dundun._

Lucy lies awake at night and listens to his hearts. She traces wondering fingers across his chest, over and over, her touch like a brand against his skin.

Lucy's with him when Torchwood falls. He watches the battle on CCTV, a direct feed from Canary Wharf to his study, half a dozen glorious screens displaying high-definition footage from a hundred cameras, fire and carnage better than any summer blockbuster. He can almost taste it, ozone and blood and waste, just like Utopia. No wonder the Doctor loves these humans so much; they are forever manufacturing their own, spectacular destruction.

The Doctor. Running about, as lost as his pet monkeys, hiding behind his messy hair and his inappropriate trainers and those absurd, preposterous 3-D glasses.

He saves the day, of course--this is known--but oh the cost! It is with reverence that he watches the Doctor head for disaster, half-aware, as a Time Lord is, and stubbornly ignoring the premonition, while the girl, oblivious, doesn't know he is going to let it happen (because he always lets it happen), won't believe it. And all around them, chaos. Panic. Humans, screaming, humans slaughtered. In his shielded study, the Minister of Defense laughs, clapping his hands together, pounding the table with his fists in a gleeful rhythm.

He doesn't bring Lucy into the study to begin with, but she wanders in as he follows the Doctor's progress, drawn by the sound of battle. She perches on his lap, gaze fixed on the screens, lips parted. He strokes her head absently, and her thigh, hardening against her arse as ignorant armies clash in the night. They gasp as one when the Daleks rise above the tower, and the arc spills open, pumping thousands of killing machines into the world. Below, Cybermen march to the engagement, their steps echoing clamourously from street and speakers.

"We're safe here," he murmurs. "We'll always be safe together."

It's great telly, this massacre. Against the deadly ostinato, themes emerge. The inimitable Yvonne Hartman clings to free will long enough to sacrifice herself for queen and country. A young woman survives, half-converted, pulled out of the inferno by her boyfriend and hidden until the battle's over. Rose Tyler risks oblivion by Void to stay with the Doctor. Love, all of it in vain.

As he's told Lucy, with Archangel in place he has no need to court public opinion, but he enjoys it, sweet-talking these humans, making them trust him. So he sends soldiers out to the Docklands, blows up a few Cybermen. It doesn't cost him much: soon enough, the Doctor opens the gash into the Void and it sucks them in, greedily, to fill its emptiness. When it's over, he keys the camera to zoom in on the blank, white wall and the Time Lord leaning melancholy against its surface. His palm and cheek rest on the sealed door, resignation as plain on his face as sorrow.

"Who is he?" Lucy asks.

"He's everything," her husband replies. "The whole of time and space, the beginning and the end. The burning god of a dozen private universes, the saviour of none. He's the favoured, prodigal son, the one to blame, the boy who ran away. He is chaos, and he's the one who will win, in the end."

He takes a sudden, sharp breath, shaking himself out of his reverie. He grins at Lucy, taking her small hand in his. "And you and I are setting a trap for him! Won't that be a lark?"

That Christmas, the Doctor returns once again, just in time to rescue the planet from another of its follies. Just in time for seeds sown long before to sprout and nourish a spider, a bug, a joke of a failed species. By the time that little entertainment is over, Lucy is all but ready, and so she earns a reprieve. After all, Britain's finest candidate for the vacant Prime Ministerial seat is a busy man. While the rest of the world distracts itself with its petty concerns, border wars and genocides and paranoid power plays (such limited imaginations these humans have, no idea of the havoc they could wreak across time and space, with their penchant for disorder: it's a bit like leading a group of halfwits in a therapeutic arts and crafts project), he puts the finishing touches on an impenetrable fortress to hang high above the filthy surface of the world, like a star that cannot be shot down.

In it, he tucks his new toy, salvaged as always from the crumbs the Doctor's dropped at his feet, now greatly improved. He pats it tenderly before activating the long countdown, locks it in its storage bay and walks away, the troubled, rufous pulsations a comforting counterpoint in the back of his mind. _Yes_ , he thinks as he inspects the Valiant's clandestine improvements, _this is good. This will do nicely_.

From then on, it is a waiting game, a matter of patience, of which, unfortunately, he has little in the current regeneration. The drums beat urgently in this quicksilver body, always impelling him to move, to live, to act, now, now, now, _now_ , as though desiring him to make up for all those years of waiting, all that calm he used to feel, in between the times when he could face his best enemy.

They don't want to wait, anymore.

Yet wait they must, so he tries to fill the time with little entertainments. With those fools at hobbled Torchwood. With the delectably oblivious Atisha Jones. With the detestable UNIT and those within that organisation who have long deserved some payback. But the games feel empty without a proper audience, and although Lucy is dutifully appreciative of his triumphs, it is too obvious there is only one person remaining, in the whole of the universe, who would make a proper audience. And he must hide himself from that mind, must hide and wait.

So, for the time being, this is all there is: the drums, and Lucy.

Vengeance, though sweet, loses its entertainment value most quickly. He supposes that among the moralising set, this outcome would be gratifying. Luckily, plotting their removal allows him to eke out a few more weeks. Torchwood is fun because they are so very, very stupid, but the few twists he's able to insert in their psyches through careful manipulation are barely discernible against the contortions already there. 

He takes personal pleasure out of what he can do to the Joneses without unbalancing the timeline.

Martha Jones would have been just another of the Doctor’s human camp followers, a toy like those found in plastic capsules, disposable and interchangeable (in truth, they all looked alike to him--except that promising Turlough who had turned out to be such a disappointment...and he'd been ginger, too), if she hadn't been _there_. If she hadn't been witness to his doddering human senescence. If he didn't imagine them laughing at him, all three of them together, mocking him. Hermits united, indeed. 

Sometimes, he sits in rare silence, remembering Malcassairo. Remembering what it was to be old, to approach helplessly the end of a life that could only be lived once, in desperation. And to know that although he was surrounded by those who loved him and believed in him, his work was a failure, and they would die. Yana had been a decrepit fool, too convincingly human, made meek and tormented by the knowledge of his own inadequacies. Small wonder that he had latched on so quickly to the echoes of his Time Lord reality, to the time ships and the manifest enemies and the miraculous biology.

He'd taken the hand, first thing he had done after becoming the Master again--a Doctor detector, a surprisingly good idea--not knowing that it would become useful later, only feeling that it meant something to him, all that it symbolised. And it is: meaningful to him, important. When he sits in silence, he sits contemplating the hand, staring at it in its bubbly aquarium for hours and hours on end, chin in his palm. The Doctor's hand, from the beginnings of this regeneration.

Slowly, slowly, the months pass, more slowly almost than the endless eternities at the foot of Mount Cadon, and finally, summer comes to Britain. In these end days, anticipation whispers to him in the very ether, and the air seems to thrum with it. Its murmurs are loud enough to deafen and blind him with their white noise, and he topples the last dominoes of his carefully-laid plan as though in a stupor. Delirious mania runs through his body like refined sugar through a child's bloodstream. Today, the Doctor meets Martha Jones. Today, they dispose of that useful puppet of an idiot Lazarus. Today, they pick up the Perversity, and run, for Utopia.

There is no guarantee, but he knows, knows it in every imprimatur nucleus, that the Doctor will return here, somehow, to the time of his departure. To the scene of the crime.

To find the Master.

How perfect, then, that this is election day. How _right_ , that the Doctor will be present to witness the triumph that has been so long in coming. To watch helplessly, despite his best efforts, as the Master wins at last.

He had never been allowed to win, no matter how precisely he planned his every move, at their childhood games. His friend pulled off victory as though it were some last-minute whimsy, and at that time, his stupid, callow self had adored him for it. How they’d snuck glances at each other, watching each other for signs of astonishment. But, now, he can feel it; he, too, has that capriciousness in him. He would _not_ be foiled by a lack of imagination. Not this time.

He enjoys showing up at the polling booth with Lucy. There is something endearing about this human faith in the rule of the mob, this determination to believe that there can be such a thing as an equitable democracy, or that they are somehow the masters of their own fate. He can read that hope, in a way, even in Lucy, though she should know better. _All the better to exploit you with, my dears._

He wins the election, of course. Voted in by his obedient little lambikins.

He does adore a good cut of mutton.

And then it's speeches and appearances and meetings and death, which helps, oh so very much, with the rhythmic boiling in his blood and that moment when his hearts are suddenly in his throat as he senses the Doctor pop into existence in a nameless street in the primitive city. Lucy knows, right away, that something has changed. With tendrils coiled deeply inside her mind, he can tell. _You're my gal, you're my pal_ , he sings to her silently, and pauses in the hallway of Number 10 Downing Street, everyone watching, for an open-mouthed, appeasing kiss. She's so beautiful, later, when she tells him she's afraid, it feels wonderful to reassure her that soon, so soon, all this waiting will come to an end.

And then _he_ calls.

And everything is forgotten.

The voices change, the bodies change, but the hearts are always the same.

The conversation is always the same.

Because they have never finished it.

And the Master wants to hear him say, wants the Doctor to say the words, wants to _make_ the Doctor say the words. Partly because he knows how it will hurt the Doctor, but partly because Gallifrey was his, too, and someone, someone _else_ has to be responsible for the fact that now she is gone, forever. Before the Master can rebuild their home, the Doctor must admit to destroying it.

He's not sure what he feels when the Doctor does, but he suspects it might be relief, which he buries under this body's lust for fire and destruction. He buries it, carefully, under the impatience and the fury and above all, the game, the very good game, that he gets to play, the one with the weighted dice and the nice costumes. (He always had appreciated a well-tailored suit.)

At the air field with the American idiot, he lets the Doctor think he can’t see him and his friends, lets his eyes slide over the Doctor’s face. He’s here to show off his human. He’s here to torment his tormentors. He’s here to laugh at them, and he needs only to be seen. His audience can hide behind their spit and baling wire duck blinds, but what’s a perception filter against all the accustomed attention of a Time Lord’s lifetime?

All night, he keeps vigil, too excited even to sit down. Eons have become years. Years have become months, days. And now, hours. The best part, he thinks, will be to touch the Doctor, when he is helpless. He remembers, still, as though through a thick glove, the sensation of the Doctor's hand in Professor Yana's as they went dashing down to the laughable laboratory. He takes Lucy's hands, distracts himself until dawn with her human skin, so very soft.

At 7:55 am, the President-elect of the United States seals his own doom with a foolproof cement comprised of equal parts pompousness and self-importance, and a bit of tea-water. At 8 o'clock, the Master's shining children reveal themselves to their ancestral planet. At 8:01, the Doctor makes his move. At 8:02, precisely, the Master makes his. 

Here come the drums! 

Here come...the drums--and, _oh_ , in such a spectrum of voices, loud and soft, high and low, like a heavenly choir, were he to believe in such primitive notions, like the voices of the Matrix all speaking at once, they shout and chant and pound it out against all the reverberant wood surfaces of the Valiant flight deck: He's won. 

He's won. He's won.

But.

But the Doctor won't admit it, and victory is hollow without some show of despondency on the part of the defeated. It's simply stubbornness, poor sportsmanship on the Doctor's part, and the Master will not stand for it. He will not stand for the Doctor's silent, wrinkly accusations.

It’s Lucy who thinks of making him watch, Lucy who even now her mind is in essence an annex to his can’t fully understand what the Doctor is to him, but lends her devilish imagination to him anyway. Lucy who helps hold the Doctor propped at the Valiant’s window, looking down at the spheres come to decimate his pet species. 

For months afterward, the Master regrets what must become of her. Hates watching it happen, but, busy with new playthings now, chooses to ignore the wrecking of his companion. He dresses her like the doll she is. He forgets what she was to him once. He completes her subjugation. 

_I am the Master_ , he thinks, _and this is what happens. I am making my destiny, and no human has the significance to stand in my way._

He’s never hit her before, but in the year to follow, he learns to, loosing the never-assuaged temper as lightning seeking ground. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he feels the blow himself, the split that mars the creamy skin, but he locks that part away, Lucy’s desperate pounding at the latched gate between their heads drowned in the noise of the drums. When his awareness of the disenchantment that turns to distress and then to despair threatens to overwhelm, he finds ways to beat her down. He toys with other humans, veiling his disgust in a play-act of desire; he puts the gun repeatedly into her hand.

Mostly, he uses her as a prop. Because the Doctor’s watching. Always watching. 

He’s all eyes these days, the Doctor. His witness. The first and the last, the only one he’s ever needed, the only one who’s ever been enough. 

Even later, when it all comes toppling around him, all thanks to Martha Jones, significant after all, and he’s railing against the unfairness of it, he knows that it must have been good. That it was worth the sanctimonious lecture and the horror of being pursued and embraced by a Doctor who acts like a god, blinding-bright and forgiving. Even later, his wrists in cuffs behind him, captured trying to run and trying to look like he doesn’t care with the Abomination breathing down his neck, what he knows is that it was right to make the Doctor watch, right to make him bear witness, for once. 

But of course, there is the one thing that the Doctor always does. He looks away.

He’s blathering on insufferably about things the Master has no intention of allowing. Things that would destroy him to allow. The Doctor’s too busy listening to himself, enjoying the sound of his own voice to hear the whispers in the air around him. 

The Master’s commands. The rhythm of his conditioning programme kicking up like a wind as he cuts the bolt on the latch on the gate in his mind. The almost catatonic human girl quietly picking up the gun the Jones woman couldn’t be goaded into using and avenging herself for the abuse she has suffered and the suffering she has seen. 

The bullet, very fast and with very little fuss, enters him, a charged concussion like the return stroke in the thunderstorm. It silences the Doctor. There’s no room in the pain for the Master to see the Doctor’s shock, but he has just enough wherewithal to hold on to his connection with Lucy (surprising, strong Lucy), essential now--

_You did well, my darling._

The impact makes him stagger back, soles slippery on the polished floor, and then he’s falling, and through the ringing aftermath of the gunshot, through, even, the ceaseless percussion, he can hear the soft, rubbery sound of the Doctor’s stupid human shoes as he dashes across the deck, having turned back far too late.

The Doctor catches him, cradling him, and the Master, yes, the Master knows just how to make him cry. 

Love--and loneliness and guilt--these things, dangerous, have made him needy and fragile. 

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

No.

It requires everything he has to refuse the impulse built into his every cell. All his life, the Master has fought to survive. This exit, too, is a strategy for survival, but on his own terms, and it is an unexpected bonus that it is also how he wins, for once. 

The Doctor’s panic is better than an entire year of his judgmental, patient helplessness. How gratifying to be both cause and object of the Doctor’s anguish now. This skinny, smug regeneration of his suffers, oh, beautifully. Just like that, he’s shaking, and then he’s shouting, he’s gritting his teeth, tears are wrecking his face, and the Master, in his arms, is so very happy. 

So he must let survival go, defy the fear and the instinct urging him to regenerate, as clamourous as the Doctor. He swallows the pain again and again and lets it fill him until the very idea of moving beyond it is impossible. In this space, his mind is almost clear, clouded only by the drums and the Doctor’s voice and the beat of his hearts efficiently pumping blood into the wound. He will not be caught clinging without dignity to life again, not if he can engineer himself a loophole. This is what he learned at the end of the universe, from the humans. He’d rather die, for now. But it’s a massive risk, no matter how carefully calculated. 

It’s coming, and even the Doctor knows it now. 

But it’ll be all right, because Lucy--his Lucy--is here.

**Author's Note:**

> Most of this fic was written in the summer of 2007, but, although it was an obligation for a fic exchange, I was unable to complete it. Over the years, I've returned to it, and now, more than ten years later, it's finally finished. I chose to leave what I had written in 2007 mostly untouched; only the ending is informed by what we've learned in the Master's several appearances since. The only detail I can remember of the exchange is that my requestor asked for a story of the Master and Lucy. If you're out there, here is your fic at last, and I'm sorry that it is so very, very overdue.


End file.
